Mental Maps and the World

This week’s lesson plan suggestion comes from National Geographic. We’re all familiar with the upside-down maps of the world (McArthur’s probably most known version), but here are some other sample that could be used to teach math (proportions), political analysis (point-of-view), geography, and more. [EF]

Today I noticed a humorous map of the U.S. that highlighted the following of college football in every state, according to the institutions that had the greatest number of fans. I thought it was very clever and probably took a good amount of knowledge to draw up. For instance, in my home state of Virginia, the map shows a greater proportion of maroon (representing Virginia Tech) than blue (for the University of Virginia, VT’s collegiate rival) which is very true. Then I got to thinking about what it was that controlled how this informal cartographer decided to assign the appropriate amounts of school colors all over the 49 states–the absence of Alaska is conspicuous…

Beyond the world of NCAA sports, I remember seeing many maps created simply from a specific perception of the outside world, whether it was truthful (not usually), humorous, or meant as a way to spread awareness of an issue. Here are a few examples of other “mental maps” that I came across…